A Filipino mother who says her family had to “swim for our lives” as a storm surge tore through her home during a 2021 typhoon is among the survivors suing Shell in the UK, in a case that will likely test whether fossil fuel companies can be held liable for specific climate disasters.
The claim, lodged at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, involves over 100 Filipinos affected by Super Typhoon Rai – known locally as Odette – which struck the country in December 2021, killing nearly 400 people and devastating coastal communities across the central Visayas, one of the three main island groups of the Philippines.
The suit seeks compensation for deaths, injuries and destroyed houses, arguing that Shell’s greenhouse gas emissions helped drive climate change in ways that made the storm more likely and more destructive.
Supporters say it’s the first major transnational civil case to directly link an oil and gas company’s emissions to personal injury and loss already suffered in the global South.
One of the claimants is Trixy Elle, who lives on a small island in central Philippines that was hit by Odette on the evening of 16 December 2021.
Speaking to The Independent, Ms Elle described how the storm intensified far beyond anything her community had experienced before.
“We usually experience signal number one, number two,” she said, referring to her country’s storm-warning system. “But this was signal number five, and we had not experienced it yet. So we decided to not evacuate and stayed on the island.”
As the typhoon made landfall, Ms Elle said the sea rose rapidly around her family’s home.
“We noticed the waves were high, going above the roof,” she said. “The water came from the window, through the wood, through the door.”
When they tried to flee, the water surged in.
“My father said to hold our hands together,” she said. “If we die, we die together.”
In a matter of moments, she recalled, they could no longer walk.
“We cannot walk, so we have to swim,” Ms Elle said. “Swim in the middle of nowhere with the big waves, strong winds, heavy rains. Yeah, we swam for our lives.”
Ms Elle said her home was destroyed and isolation made survival harder in the days that followed.
“Because we live on an island, we’re isolated. No help comes for many days – no food, no water,” she said. “Only the clothes we were wearing were left to us.”
“You feel so devastated, hopeless, helpless,” she added. “We don’t have any insurance for our houses, for the livelihoods that we have. So we have nothing.”
The legal case seeks to turn experiences like Ms Elle’s into a claim for damages, arguing that Shell’s contribution to global warming materially increased the risks faced by communities like hers.
Danilo Garrido, a lawyer with the advocacy group Greenpeace, told The Independent the claimants would argue that “Shell is responsible for their contribution to said harm”, noting that the company was responsible for “over two per cent of all historic global carbon emissions”.
“The case will assert that the defendant’s past and present carbon emissions and their intentional deception have contributed to anthropogenic climate change, which has made cyclones like Odette more intense and unpredictable,” Mr Garrido said.
He said the claim would also argue that Shell “knew of their role in causing climate change since 1965 at the latest, but still continued to increase investment in fossil fuels”.
A central pillar of the case is climate attribution science, research that examines how climate change alters the likelihood and intensity of specific extreme weather events.
Mr Garrido pointed to a 2025 analysis by climate scientists at Imperial College London and the University of Sheffield which found that “both extreme rainfall and wind speeds in the Philippines due to storms like Odette have become significantly more likely and intense due to anthropogenic climate change”.
Though the lawsuit is filed in the UK, it applies Philippine law, reflecting the fact that the damage occurred there.
Mr Garrido said this followed established legal principles under the Rome II Regulation, and targeted Shell as a UK-domiciled parent company rather than its local subsidiaries.
Legal observers said the case could build on recent UK court decisions that allowed overseas communities to pursue claims against British-based multinationals for harms suffered abroad, potentially lowering procedural barriers that once kept such cases out of English courts.
The claim is being supported by several civil society groups, who argue that advances in science now make it possible to link corporate emissions to real-world harm with far greater confidence than in the past.
Shell rejected the suit as a “baseless claim”.
“It will not help tackle climate change or reduce emissions,” a spokesperson for the company told The Independent.
“The suggestion that Shell had unique knowledge about climate change is simply not true. The issue and how to tackle it has been part of public discussion and scientific research for many decades.”
“This claim also overlooks the benefits energy brings and the decades of choices made by governments, businesses and consumers that have shaped our energy system,” the spokesperson added. “At Shell, we are reducing emissions from our operations and helping customers to reduce theirs, as we provide the vital energy needed today and in the future.”
Shell previously argued that the majority of its reported emissions came from the use of its products by consumers, rather than from its own operations.
For Ms Elle, the case is about accountability as much as compensation. “If we remain in silence, if we do not do something today, what will happen to our future, especially me? I have children,” she said.
She said increasingly frequent and intense storms in the Philippines had made the threat feel relentless.
“Before, superstorms were very rare in the Philippines,” she said. “But now it seems normal. The frequency, the intensity, is not really normal.”
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